The Runner
by Erisah Mae
Summary: Sarah always ran from everything. And then she had nowhere left to run...
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: I own nothing of the Labyrinth. Not one thing._

Chapter 1: Run Away

Sarah was a runner. She had always been a runner. When faced with confusion, hurt or uncertainty, her first response was always to try and escape. Her father hadn't understood it when his little girl had suddenly retreated into fantasy when Linda had left him. He didn't understand why she chased after the image of a woman who had hurt them both so very badly.

It was because Sarah was her mother's daughter, and introspection and considering the perspectives of others felt too much like staying still.

So instead she ran. Straight into the arms of fantasy, where she could pretend that she was strong, and brave, and able to stand up for herself. Where she had friends who liked her for being her, strangers met on the journey who joined her, and where her judgement was the only thing standing between her party and failure. She was a knight, a princess, a sorceress. The heroine. She slayed her own dragons, and caught the eyes of powerful, mysterious kings.

Of course, reality had a nasty habit of reasserting itself.

Her father met Karen, and then Sarah had a step-mother, a woman who didn't understand her, and truly didn't understand that she didn't understand her. She just assumed that Sarah was of course a bratty teenager, jealous of her step-mother and then her half-brother taking up room in her father's freshly emptied heart.

Karen wasn't completely wrong, but her exasperation and poorly-aimed suggestions that Sarah go and spend time with her friends, or find a boyfriend were just another thing that made Sarah run all the harder. Especially when Karen started suggesting to her father that they let Sarah babysit Toby. Karen thought that it would teach Sarah responsibility.

Sarah felt the burden of being the one that needed to protect her helpless baby half-brother, and felt despair, as once turned into three times, then twelve, and then almost every weekend.

The few friends that Sarah had started to draw away when Sarah had to keep refusing their increasingly half-hearted invitations to spend time with them, because she needed to stay home on Saturday night and look after the baby.

Once when Sarah protested babysitting duty, Karen had said obliviously, callously, that it wasn't as though Sarah ever had any plans on the weekend anyway.

Karen had immediately felt guilty for those words when she had seen Sarah's face fall, stricken, before it was obscured as Sarah turned and ran, long dark tresses and silly tasselled sleeves streaming behind her as the door slammed.

It didn't get Sarah out of babysitting duty that night, but Karen resolved to try and be a little more careful of what she said. After all, she remembered how much it sucked to be a teenager.

And then, in a moment that was less jealousy and was more pure frustration, Sarah had wished away baby Toby into the arms of the Goblin King.

And then Sarah was a Runner.

This time she was running towards something rather than running away, and the Labyrinth gave her everything that she had ever wished for- adventure, friends, challenges, a romantic dance with a beautiful man.

Well, Fey. But there was a reason why they said be careful what you wish for. The Goblin King was nothing if not both powerful and mysterious. Ethereally handsome, too. Oh, and a nice singing voice. Can't forget that.

And then she had found Toby, chasing him through the Escher room, and then finally leaping to almost certain death for him. Because it wasn't his fault that she felt ill-equipped to look after him. It wasn't his fault he was too young to be self-sufficient. He didn't deserve to suffer for her foolish, selfish words. She hadn't really thought that words were important, that it was even possible that such things as goblins and their king existed. He would not become a goblin for her mistake. She would not allow it, and she would run until she could escape the consequences of her own petulant ignorance.

But then the world had shattered, and then there was her, and the Goblin King Jareth, standing atop a precipice.

And Jareth, who had tempted her by offering her her dreams, had offered her himself.

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave."

And shown himself to be yet another person to have misread Sarah, because he gave her something to run from, (asking her to stop running, to be enclosed, to be his captive and his master, safe forever and in mortal peril- later he cursed himself for not stopping to think and remember that really, Sarah was only barely not a child, and from a culture that would not encourage her to grow up in the way he was asking her to for a number of years yet) and running was what she was best at.

It wasn't that he had no power over her. She knew that, he knew that. Hell, no being who might have witnessed that scene would have been able to surely state that Sarah's statement was entirely true.

But the words were brave words spoken out of fear, and the Labyrinth and the King could see that escape was her heart's wish and Sarah found herself back in her room, with Toby sleeping safely in his cot.

For the first time, Sarah felt that her running had brought her to an outcome that showed a tangible, permanent victory, and in one sense, she was completely correct. She had saved Toby after all, and made sure that he could grow up as a human. Although she later realised that he had not been entirely unaltered by his time in the Underground, nonetheless, she felt that her choice had ultimately been the right one. Her father and Karen did not deserve to have their child stolen from them, stolen from their memories, because they had put their trust in a petty teenager.

In another sense, she knew that she had left something vital of herself in the Labyrinth, something that she was never going to get back.

Having proven herself to herself, Sarah became more confident, more reckless than she had ever been, even though she had to a large extent finally grown up. She raced through the years from high school to university with a laugh and a smile, flitting past peers that admired her without knowing her, or quite knowing why, beyond the superficial traits of her being witty, and pretty, and vivacious.

Some lusted after her, but Sarah was too fast for them. Few could hold her attention for long, and some bitterly called her fickle, until it became clear that she treated everyone with the same detached friendliness, that was happy to listen and absorb until something new came about and caught her attention. Everything was somehow fascinating, and bright, and sometimes even dream-like around Sarah, as she raced from one distraction to another, as though living on borrowed time.

But then one day, the dreams turned to nightmares.

Sarah had been driving her car along the highway. It was night time. She was travelling quickly, but not above the speed limit. Rain was pouring down in sheets, so that the cars coming from the other direction looked like great twinned nimbuses of light until they were up close.

And then suddenly one of those nimbuses swerved without warning, and skidded into her lane of traffic, moving too quickly for Sarah to do more than reflexively hit the brakes, her vision filled entirely with the too-bright lights, before suddenly there was the impact, and everything went black.

And Stayed That Way.

And then Sarah couldn't run any more.

_..._

_A/N: Because apparently I'm incapable of sticking to one project. Ever. In case you missed the classification, or the chapter content for that matter, this is going to be considerably more serious than most of my other stuff. It will probably also be short. I have the first three or so chapters written out though (very unusual for me I assure you), so updates should be regular-ish._


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Sarah sat at the desk, her favourite crocheted blanket draped over her shoulders like a shawl, her fingers running slowly across the pages of the book in front of her. Dimly, she could hear the sounds of her step-mother pottering around the kitchen. Sarah had to give credit where it was due, Karen had been quick to suggest Sarah "come home" until she was back on her feet.

In fact, Sarah and Karen had never got on so well as they did now, since the accident.

It wasn't that they never fought. That would be ridiculous to even suggest. They were too fundamentally different people to never fight.

But Karen had been the only person to not treat Sarah differently since the accident, and Sarah was grateful enough for it to bite her tongue when Karen did or said things that were too small to bother arguing about.

The accident had forced Sarah to significantly reshape her priorities, and now small things like acting being a useless profession anyway just weren't worth arguing about. Sarah, now that she was pinned down with more time to think than she had ever wanted, now realised that those comments Karen made that could be taken as subtle insults against Sarah's mother Linda in fact actually were. The thing was though, Sarah had come to realise, Karen only tended to make those comments when Linda had done something worthy of censure.

Like not having time to see her daughter.

Even in the long months in hospital, Linda had only shown up once. She had turned up when Sarah had been asleep, and had woken her up with a horrified shriek.

That was the first time Sarah knew for sure that the car crash hadn't exactly left her looking pretty. She had been able to guess as much, since she could feel where the bandages and stitches were. She remembered the face-full of glass she had taken when the windscreen had shattered inwards.

But everyone else had been too polite, or too scared of her reaction to mention it.

Before Linda, who had screamed, and had then fallen into hysterics about her beautiful daughter being destroyed.

She had called Sarah later and apologised, but then immediately begun talking about plastic surgery.

Sarah though, knew that her family, middle-class though they were, didn't have that kind of money. Not when they had to pay off her hospital bills already. Not when she needed to visit specialists and needed special equipment. She didn't even bother asking Linda for any. Her mother was a feckless spendthrift, a magpie buying whatever shiny things that pleased her, without worrying about things like savings or rainy days.

Besides, Sarah found it increasingly hard to care about appearances these days.

Not being able to see them anyway put a particular damper on that.

"Sarah! Tell me a story!"

Sarah didn't jump. She'd heard Toby's clomping feet as he ran into the house, shaking the floorboards enough to make the cabinets rattle.

"Hey Toby," she replied. "School okay?"

"Yeah..." Toby drawled disinterestedly, before pestering her for a story again.

For the first month after the accident, Toby had been quiet. Far too quiet for an eight year old boy. Sarah, even in the midst of struggling to cope with her injuries had been appalled. One day, when they had been sitting in awkward silence, she had decided she'd had enough, and just to fill the silence, she began to tell him a story about goblins, and magic, and escaping oubliettes. Just like he used to when he was small, (once he was old enough to understand words, instead of just tone of voice,) he listened to her story with rapt attention.

When she was finished, he had bombarded her with questions, and then begged her for another.

Back before, Karen had always rolled her eyes at Sarah's storytelling, but since the first time she had seen Sarah telling a story since the accident, watching how the two half-siblings interacted with something resembling their old energy, instead of miserable strained politeness, she had even taken Toby aside and encouraged him to keep asking Sarah for stories. It had been an unnecessary action- Toby was a bright kid, but even if he'd been as dim as some of the goblins in Sarah's stories, he'd have noticed how Sarah just seemed more _alive_ when she was storytelling.

Sarah knew what they were doing, and she was grateful for it.

Once again, Sarah found an escape.

So she told Toby stories, and learned to read Braille and listened to the radio, and to Karen, as she puttered about the house, working in her office in the mornings (Karen was a free-lance architect,) and then usually cleaning or gardening in the afternoons.

She interacted with her father too when he was home, but even more than she remembered, he was always at business meetings, or important functions with movers and shakers, or travelling to conventions. When he was home, the talk was small, and the conversation functional. She loved her father, but she knew that her injuries had shocked him, and that his time spent away throwing himself into his work was his attempt to come to grips with it.

Sometimes, she thought that maybe she hadn't inherited the running from just her mother after all.

If asked, Sarah would nominate the blindness as the worst of the outcomes from the accident. Not being able to see the sunset, or the mist in the park, or the lights in the city at night, or even the faces of her family was devastating.

But it was hardly the only effect of the accident.

She'd been told it was a miracle that she'd survived at all, and more of one that she'd suffered from no paralysis. She thanked the gods for small favours, as at least this way she didn't need a colostomy bag or a ventilator. She could move perfectly well...

In her wheelchair.

The Impact had crushed Sarah's legs almost to a bloody pulp. She was incredibly fortunate not to have died of blood-loss, but the ambulance and the fire department had been quick to respond to the crash reported on one of the major highways, and had got her out even quicker.

So she was told. She had been mercifully unconscious until almost a full day later, when she had awoken in the hospital to discover that her legs had both been amputated above the knee. Apparently the operation had taken hours, and she was lucky her blood-type wasn't rare. She had a cracked sternum and a few broken ribs as well, but even though they made it hard to breathe, or laugh for a while, eventually they healed up completely, albeit with pins in them. She had had it explained in more detail than that of course, but when you're in a fug of painkillers and shock, sometimes exact details escape you. When she was aware and alert enough to start processing things properly again, she decided that she had the most important details down anyway.

Blind. Crippled. Scarred.

Terrified.

Sarah could appreciate the sick irony of being a Runner without legs.

She had also had some minor damage to her hands, but once the scars healed over, she had engaged in hours of mindless physical therapy exercises to ensure that she lost no range of motion. It wasn't like there was anything better to do, and as she had snapped at one trainee nurse whispering too loudly from the doorway, _this_ was something that she could fix herself.

The loss of the independence had hurt the most, but Sarah, having learnt her lesson the hard way, was determined not to complain.

If the Labyrinth had taught her anything, it was that life wasn't fair.

The accident had provided enough ammunition that no decent person would have blamed Sarah for complaining, but she had gotten out of that habit, and had instead developed a strategy not far from that of a cornered animal. If she could run, she would. If backed into a corner, she would fight until the obstacle moved.

She was now teaching herself the piano. She'd had lessons when she was younger, but had dropped them after practising became a chore. Now that she had nothing but time on her hands, she was playing again, and this time, she was appreciating the simple patterns of the different scales and arpeggios. She couldn't read her old sheet music, of course, but even if there hadn't been Braille music, Sarah had always had a fairly good ear for music. At first she had stumbled and driven Karen to politely go for long walks, or shopping for groceries whilst Sarah banged away at the piano, but now, a good year onward, Sarah could knock out enough decent tunes that sometimes, when her father was home, he asked if he could listen.

Sarah thought that now, her days of running were long behind her.

She thought wrong.

...

_A/N: No, I don't have a weird thing about amputees. It's just that when I was picturing the crash, that's what part of Sarah got crushed. Also it fits with the runner theme, albeit in a League of Gentlemen (that's a very very dark British Comedy for those of you who want to scar yourselves) sense._

_Let me know what you think- I'm going for realistically morbid._


	3. Chapter 3

It had been a normal Thursday night, except that her father had been home. Apparently one of his clients had cancelled the dinner meeting.

Sarah hadn't seen the sarcastic look that Karen shot him at that statement, but she had heard the desert-dry tone of voice when she had commented about him forgetting what her cooking tasted like.

Toby, like any other kids when the adults are fighting, was well aware of the tension, and so loudly asked Sarah to come with him to the lounge-room at the back of the house and tell him a story.

Sarah had been more than happy to oblige him, and had even allowed Toby to push her chair into the lounge-room whilst the parental figures fought in the kitchen. Normally she never let anyone push her chair, determined to hold onto at least some form of dignified mobility within her control. The other options were crawling on the floor or an odd bum-wriggle that Sarah had been told by the physio had been originally perfected by a kid who had had multiple broken limbs. Since she then had to worry about a whole new set of unseen obstacles at this level, such as chair legs and end-tables, she avoided this when she could.

Toby had begged for his favourite story, and so Sarah had begun to tell him, about the Goblin King and the selfish girl who had carelessly wished away her baby brother, and who had then had to defeat the Goblin King's Labyrinth to get him back. These days she told it from the perspective of the Goblin King, because she had decided, (and Toby had gleefully confirmed) that the story was much more entertaining with the sarcastic running commentary of the Goblin King, who disbelieved that this upstart chit was making such progress against his labyrinth.

Also, Sarah had to admit, it was less painful this way. This way she could use her adult perspective to make fun of the spoilt brat she had been without having to remember what it had felt like. There had been a while in which she would regularly talk through the mirror, to her friends in the Labyrinth, but eventually, she had had to move away for college. She had still visited them when she'd come home for holidays, but then there had been the accident, and the long months in hospital. When she'd come home, she'd learnt that her room had been moved downstairs, to make it easier with the wheelchair. The only thing to have not survived the move had been her mirror- her father had not realised how heavy the frame really was, and so had dropped it.

Apparently it had shattered into a million tiny pieces.

Sarah had cried when she heard, but no one had understood why. Still, she supposed it might be for the best. She wasn't sure she wanted her old friends seeing her like this. Especially if it might get back to Jareth. If he laughed, to see his old foe brought to such a condition... Or worse, if he pitied her. Neither reaction was one she wanted to learn of, and so she was almost grateful that that mode of communication had been closed to her.

She had got far into the tale for the night, nearly at the end, where she told the part where the King watched in disgust as Hoggle and Sir Didymus told the girl, "If you need us..." when there was a resounding crash from the front door.

"Toby, what's happening?" she demanded quietly.

She heard soft footsteps, and assumed that Toby was poking his head around the corner of the door.

Toby clutched his big sister's arm, and whispered in her ear about the scary men in the black ski-masks who had just crashed through the front door. "They have guns, Sarah," he told her. "Big ones." She could feel his hands shaking.

Sarah swore under her breath.

"Did they see you?" she breathed.

"No," whispered Toby, "but I think they're searching the house."

Sarah could hear tromping boots and slamming doors, and knew that Toby was right.

"Okay, this is what you're going to do," she murmured, hugging her brother close. "Go out through the window, and straight to Mrs. Kinnear's place. Go through the gardens, I know you can hop the fence. Don't stop until you get there, and call the cops. Now go!"

Sarah heard a soft rustle, and assumed Toby had nodded, because the next sound she heard was the catch on the window, then more rustling, before she heard a soft gasp along with an impact in the bushes.

And not a moment too soon, because that was when she heard the heavy boots come to a stop just outside the lounge-room doorway.

...

_A/N: Yeah, I know, cliff hanger, and ridiculously short chapter. That's because the next bit is quite a bit longer, and I thought I should warn people:_

_THE NEXT CHAPTER CONTAINS VIOLENCE, AND VIOLENT PEOPLE THREATENING INCREDIBLY VIOLENT THINGS, INCLUDING TORTURE. IF THIS IS LIKELY TO DISTURB YOU, I RECOMMEND NOT READING THE NEXT CHAPTER. _

_If there is anyone who wants to keep reading this story, but can't cope with violence, I will happily email you a version of the chapter with the nasty bits edited out, so you can keep reading._

_Okay, I feel like I've done my duty. Next chapter up tomorrow._


	4. Chapter 4

Sarah could feel the mook's gaze on her. She wondered why he was just staring at her.

"Holy shit, what the fuck happened to you, lady?"

Sarah nearly burst out into hysterical laughter at the absurdity. A home invasion, and the first thing the thug had to say to her?

"Car accident," she said dryly. "Who are you?"

"I'm- that's not important." He sounded young, Sarah thought distantly. Younger than she was.

"Okay," she said philosophically. At least she'd tried. "Then why are you barging into my father's house with those heavy boots?"

"...You can't see me, can you." It was a statement rather than a question. Sarah wondered what had clued him in.

"Either that or I'm trying to emulate the Blues Brothers," Sarah said, touching the dark shades that she had gotten into the habit of wearing. Apparently the empty gaze of her glass eyes was freaky. "Or I'm a cosplay enthusiast, practising for Halloween. The scars are all make up, and my missing legs are an optical illusion."

"Really?"

"No."

A second pair of boots walked towards the entranceway. "What have you found, oh hellooo."

Sarah sighed inwardly. Were these goons reciting lines from the Mook's playbook? It occurred to her that these irreverent thoughts were springing up in her mind's desperate attempt to keep her calm.

"And who's this?" the second mook asked.

"I'm Sarah," she said. "Who are you?" She could feel her knuckles going white on the arms of her wheelchair.

Unfortunately, the mook wasn't stupid enough to answer her, and simply walked over to her chair and started pushing her.

"Hey!" she protested. "I can wheel myself!"

Granted, it generally took her a while, as she had to go slow to avoid bumping into things, but it was the principle of the thing!

The mook didn't bother to respond, and the next thing Sarah knew, she had been pushed into the kitchen. She could tell because the linoleum felt and sounded different under the wheels than the wooden floorboards did and she could hear her father talking to what she assumed was more goons.

"...I'll give you the money, I swear!"

"It's too late for that." The voice that replied to her father's desperate one was eerily calm. Sarah resisted the urge to shiver. She had stood up to the Goblin King, after all. She refused to show her fear to a mere human. "You reneged on the deal, Williams. You thought there wouldn't be consequences?"

"I didn't mean to! I didn't realise that Karen had already paid the latest of Sarah's expenses from that account! I can still get the money! I just need to-"

"That's a touching story," the calm voice interrupted. "But I'm afraid that our mutual friend has lost patience with you, Williams."

"Who the hell are you people!?" Karen suddenly demanded, shrilly. "What the hell is going on?! Robert, _what have you done_!?"

"Karen, I-"

Her father's pleading voice was cut-off by a sound Sarah recognised from the movies as a silenced gunshot, and a splash of something warm and liquid hit her.

"Nooo! Karen! Oh god oh god, No! Ka-" A second gunshot. A second warm, metallic splash.

Sarah gripped the arms of her chair so tightly that she could feel her fingers were going numb. Was this it? Were these the last moments she had? Covered in the blood of her father and Karen?

Sarah gritted her teeth, knowing that if she still had tear ducts, she'd be crying right about now. She would not show fear. Not to these murderers. She had not shown her fear to the Goblin King. She was older now, a good deal less naïve and a lot more aware of her own mortality, but she would not show fear, even if they decided to hurt her before she died.

At least she had saved Toby. Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, she had fought her way to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that she had so selfishly, carelessly wished away. No human goons were going to manage what the Goblin King had failed at.

If he had gotten away safely, then she knew she could go to her death with as few regrets as possible.

She didn't want to die.

Oh gods, she didn't want to die.

She gripped the arms of her wheelchair, and braced herself for what she knew was coming.

_A/N: Next chapter is coming in about a week. Oh, and it features a very evil man saying some pretty evil things, so again, fair warning._


	5. Chapter 5

"So. Sarah isn't it?" Sarah nodded wordlessly, her jaw aching from how tightly she was clenching it. The man's tone was as calm as before, conversational. In the context, that just made it more horrifying.

"I just killed both of your parents."

Sarah nodded again, dumbly. Vaguely she thought that he had it wrong, Karen wasn't her mother, but that was a detail that she was hard-pressed to care about right this moment.

"If you tell me where your brother is, then I'll let you live."

Sarah couldn't help herself. She started to laugh hysterically.

"Stop it. Stop laughing, or I'll shoot you." For the first time, the voice sounded irritated.

"C-can't kill me just yet, you apparently need me to tell you where Toby is," Sarah gasped, holding

her sides, trying hard to stop laughing.

"I never said I was going to kill you, I said I was going to shoot you," came the response, calm again, as though he was reading from the dictionary. "Thank you for your return to calm. I would now like you to tell me what is so funny."

Sarah snorted. "Oh please. I might not be able to see you, but I'm still a witness. There's no way in hell that you're going to let me live. Why on _earth_ do you think I'm going to tell you where my brother is? What do you want with him anyway? He's just a kid."

"You aren't as clever as you think you are, Sarah," the calm voice drawled her name. "I would be perfectly happy to let you live, because, as you say, you can't see me. You only know my voice, and that alone would never be enough for the cops to find me." Sarah heard him step closer to her. "But if you _don't_ tell me where your brother is, well, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to hurt you, Sarah."

"What, you're going to inflict _pain_ on me?" Sarah didn't even bother to keep the scorn out of her voice. "Please. I'm no stranger to pain. Most mornings I wake up, and I still feel as though my legs are pinned, pulverised in the car crash. The only painkillers that work to distract me from it are ridiculously addictive, so I don't take them. It's bad enough being dependent on this," she gestured to her wheelchair, with a violent motion, "without being a _drug addict_ as well."

Suddenly, Sarah felt as though someone had stabbed her thigh with a spear. Dimly, she realised that the man had called her bluff, and shot her in what remained of her right leg.

She didn't bother to hold back her scream. Maybe the neighbours would hear. Probably not. Either way, it was worth a try.

A sharp pain across the right side of her face, and her sunglasses flew off. Stars burst in the darkness. He'd hit her, to shut her up.

Sarah started laughing again. "Nice try. Do it again. If you get me at the right angle, my glass eyes will probably pop out."

"Jesus, what are you, some kind of masochist?"

Sarah recognised the voice of the younger goon who had first found her.

"Shut up!" hissed the other one, the one that had wheeled her out into the kitchen. "Or there will be five bodies in this house before we're done here."

Sarah's head might be swimming a little from the blow, but she could count.

"Oh I get it," she said. "You want to kill all of us. Probably some kind of statement. The message won't be complete without my brother. Need the full set of Williams', don't you. But Toby isn't here." she grinned triumphantly, "and I'm not going to tell you where he is. You cannot do anything to me that would make me tell you where he is."

There was a pause.

"Well, now you're just offending my professional pride. As are my colleagues." The calm voice now had undertones of being livid. If it hadn't been for her own situation, Sarah would have hated to be the mooks. "You're a brave girl, but given enough time, I could make you talk." His voice was disturbingly sensual, as though he was flirting with her. "First, I would cut your clothes off. Then, I would beat you bloody, until no one could possibly recognise you, even with the scars. Then, I would cut off your fingers, one by one. Then, I would rape you. And then, I would be left with so many _options_ for what to do to you next. Eventually, you would _beg_ me for death. But I would not let you have it, until you told me where your brother is."

"Monster." Sarah couldn't stop herself from blurting out the word.

"Yes," the man actually chuckled, and Sarah shuddered violently. "But see, I'm a little pressed for time, so I'm not going to bother with all of that. Instead, I'll just tell you that I'm going to kill you now, and then I'm going to watch, and wait, and then eventually, someone will slip up, and I'll find your brother Toby, and I'll splatter his brains across your gravestone."

Sarah was trapped. She had been willing to die for Toby, but she knew that the man was right. If her death was going to be futile anyway, then there was no point in holding back her trump card, her card that she had hoped she would never have to use.

She just hoped to the gods that this worked.

She took a deep breath, and then screamed, "Jareth! Goblin King! I wish the goblins would take Toby away!" A blinding pain to the left side of her face, but she kept yelling. "Right Now!"

Another hit, and this one threw her backwards, so that her chair fell over and her head hit the floor.

She heard steps running towards her, felt the floor shuddering under the clomping boots...

And then suddenly the world went still.

Sarah smiled, despite the throbbing headache she now had.

Even now, she was still running.

But this time, it was straight to the Goblin King.

_A/N: Whew! Horrifically violent bit done with. But the drama is far from over. Tune in next time, for the Goblin King's Intervention._


End file.
